by Ben George
Some years ago I came across an anecdote about Flaubert, how he was taking a stroll with friends one Sunday afternoon when his group passed a bourgeois couple with young children. They were an ordinary French family, nothing remarkable, and yet the sight rocked Flaubert with a sudden revelation. “Ils sont dans le vrai!” he exclaimed to his companions, turning to stare after the family. Then, as he and his friends resumed their walk, he began shaking his head and muttering to himself as if struggling to absorb what he’d just seen, “Ils sont dans le vrai…Ils sont dans le vrai…” They’re in the real. They’re living the true life. Flaubert led as full a life as any man could reasonably hope for: he worked hard at his art, traveled widely, had a circle of brilliant friends, enjoyed affairs with beautiful women and lots of exotic commercial sex. But the sight of that bourgeois family staggered him; it was as if he realized that his lifelong bachelorhood, however pleasurable it might have been, had barred him from some ordinary yet profound truth.
I suppose I’ve lived that truth, although I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is. Perhaps it lies in the dailiness of family life, in the unspectacular accretion of weeks and years of being a married man and father, and the fact that we’ll fail, the whole premise of “family” will fail, unless we’re consciously, diligently trying to give more than we take. And to the extent that we fail or succeed in this, that’s the world. Somewhere in that gray area between the extremes lies the difference between making a good life and making a bad one, and so much of it gets determined when we’re tired, when we don’t feel well in ourselves, when we’re distracted or numbed by the daily grind and too many nights of short sleep. Those memories are as vivid as any I have, the times I needed to be a better person, a better parent, and even as I was doing the best I could, I knew it wasn’t very good. We’re always falling short, so it’s a question of degree—of where in that gray area we fall. But when we do come through, that’s as close a brush with grace as many of us will ever have. I failed a lot, but sometimes I did all right, and again my mind goes back to those nights when I managed to do some good. Fetching a glass of water, stroking a fevered brow. “What if there’s nothing after we die?” But holding hands, talking softly in the dark—this was something. At least this.
THE CHAOS MACHINE
An Essay on Postmodern Fatherhood with Footnotes by Daniel Baxter
CHARLES BAXTER
Late spring in southern Minnesota, 1998: the days build from deceptively clear mornings to damp overheated afternoons. I have driven from Michigan to pick up my son at college and to take him home for summer break. As I enter Northfield, Minnesota—a sign announces the town, modestly boasting of its “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment”—I open the window and smell the faint receding scent of farm fields and the stronger cardboardish odor of the Malt-O-Meal plant just inside the city limits.
A strange mix, a pleasantly naive Midwestern smell. Our minivan, emptied of its benches and rear seat, should accommodate all my son’s college paraphernalia, but the van, too, has an aroma—of Tasha, the family dog, a keeshond, and of the coffee I have been drinking mile after mile to stay awake. In fact, the van smells of all the Baxters. In Michigan the previous day I witnessed an accident near Albion, a woman driving suicidally into a bridge abutment; as a result, today I am shaky and still unnerved, and I am giving off a bad odor myself.
Daniel meets me in his dorm room. My spirit lifts when I see him. We hug. He is smiling but preoccupied and quiet, as he often is. Typical college kid? How would I know? He’s the only son—the only child—I have. We arrange to go out to dinner at some air-conditioned Northfield bistro. Later, eating his pasta, a favorite food, he tells me that, yes, he will help me load up the van tomorrow, but, well, uh, he also needs to work with his friend Alex on a physics project the two of them have cooked up and have almost finished, a “chaos machine,” as he calls it. He tries to explain to me what the chaos machine is, and I manage to figure out that it’s some sort of computer randomizer. Much of the time when he explains anything technical to me—he has a brilliant mind for physics and engineering—I am simply baffled. I try to disguise my ignorance by nodding sagely and keeping my mouth shut. One’s dignity should ideally stay intact in front of one’s adult children.
So, OK, I will load the van tomorrow myself.*
I drop him off at his dorm and go back to the motel to get a night’s sleep. All night—I suffer from insomnia, and the motel’s pillow seems to be made out of recycled Styrofoam—I smell the production odors from the Malt-O-Meal plant, the smell of hot cereal that I was served every winter when I myself was disguised as a child.
My own father died of a heart attack when I was eighteen months old. I remember nothing of him, this smiling mythical figure, this insurance salesman, my dad (a word I have never been able to speak in its correct context to anyone). Said to have a great sense of humor, grace, and charm, John Baxter, whoever he was, withdrew his model of fatherhood from me before I could get at it. It’s not his fault, but there’s a hole in me where he might have been. There’s much that I don’t know and have never known about parenthood and other male qualifiers, such as the handyman thing. I once tried to assemble a lawn mower by myself, and on its maiden voyage across the lawn, it sprayed screws and nuts and bolts in every direction, an entertaining spectacle for the onlookers, my wife and son.
Lying in the Northfield Country Inn, wide awake, I wonder if my father would have driven to my own college to help me move myself back home. Maybe yes. But somehow I doubt it. Growing up, I did not live in a universe in which such things ever happened.
In college, I was vaguely afraid of parenthood myself, as many young men are. Indeed, fatherhood, that form of parenthood specific to my gender—and which should be avoided at all costs, according to Donald Barthelme in The Dead Father—rose up before me during the early years of my marriage as a cloud of unknowing. What, past the conception stage, do fathers actually do? How should they behave? No usable models had presented themselves to me, though I had been given a good non-model, an intermittently generous, Yale-educated, martini-drinking, Shakespeare-quoting stepfather, a successful attorney, gardener, and quietly raucous anti-Semite who had loved me and taken care of me in a distant Victorian way. Step-fathering, however, is not identical to fathering, at least in my stepfather’s case; for him, it was largely a peripheral occupation. It gave him the right to make pronouncements, his favorite being, “Life is hard.”
Recently, reading an account of Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, I noted that he believes that a father’s duty is to teach his sons to fight and to hunt. I haven’t done either, nor will I. I am a traitor, it seems, to my gender. Once my wife said, “All you’re teaching Daniel is irony.”
Martha, my wife, always appeared right from the start to have a clear idea of what motherhood required, and she set to it with determination and alacrity. “Women don’t need the manual,” I thought irritably at the time; “they just know how to do these things.” Me, I needed the manual. But the manual cannot be found in a book. So I was an ironic parent, a chaos machine myself.
Rules to live by:
WHEN THE SERVER BRINGS THE BILL, ALWAYS GRAB IT BEFORE ANYONE ELSE DOES.
LIFE ISN’T PARTICULARLY SERIOUS UNTIL IT BECOMES SO.
TRY TO BE KIND TO PEOPLE. BE GENEROUS.
A GOD NAMED LARRY IS THE GOD OF PARKING. DON’T ASK ME HOW I KNOW THIS. PRAY TO LARRY FOR PARKING SPACES WHEN YOU NEED ONE, AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED.
The next day, Daniel and I have breakfast together. Then I begin loading the van. It’s getting hot. Daniel’s room is cluttered with clothes (a tropical-colored shirt* for his performances in his cult rock band, Grätüïtöüs Ümläüt,† for which he plays keyboards), amplifiers, CDs, a VHS copy of Repo Man, and books, including Moby-Dick. Easy things first: I’ll start with the blankets.
Following his birth, my son had a fearsomely difficult infancy. In those days, he had a different name: Nathaniel. He came out of the womb jaundiced and stayed
jaundiced for longer than is usual. He could not breast-feed and lost weight following his birth. “Failure to thrive,” the doctor said, darkly. When he was finally able to nurse, he proved, in time, to be colicky and irritable. The doctor prescribed phenobarbital, which helped, briefly. Then the house was filled, morning until night, with the sound of desperate crying from the nursery. This production of noise from babies is not unusual, and many parents get used to it. Martha did. I didn’t. I would take Nathaniel outside under the crabapple tree, which sometimes calmed him down, but I was criticized for not letting him cry himself out.* We took Nathaniel off milk and supplemented his breast-feeding with soy, in the hopes that he would find it more digestible, then from soy to a manufactured protein called Nutramigen. Often when I hugged him, he bent backward away from me, as if in pain.
As Nathaniel lies in his crib, I watch him. I am afraid of him. I am afraid to pick him up; he looks so breakable. What if I drop him? What should I do, as his dad? On one occasion, I try to cut his baby fingernails and make a mistake, cutting into a bit of skin, and he begins to howl, and I am besieged with guilt over my carelessness. Martha comes upstairs. “What happened? What did you do?” she asks me, distraught.
On another occasion, I am feeding him with a baby bottle full of Nutramigen, and Martha comes upon me and is completely overcome with jealousy; she tries to talk it through but cannot defeat this emotion. She will feed Nathaniel from now on, she says. She cannot bear to see me feeding him. It does not occur to me to fight over this.
Heavier things now: I pack up Daniel’s keyboard. One of his keyboards. He has several. Now his cello. The cello rests inside an enormous protective black case, lined inside with what looks like velvet.
More rules to live by:
5. MUSIC MAKES LIFE EASIER AND OFTEN JUST PLAIN BEARABLE.
6. MOST GOOD WORKS REQUIRE OBSESSIVE DETAIL.
7. LOSING YOUR TEMPER, THOUGH SATISFYING, USUALLY DOESN’T GET YOU ANYWHERE, AND IT CREATES MORE TROUBLE THAN IT’S WORTH.
8. TAKE LONG WALKS, ESPECIALLY ON WEEKENDS. NATURE RESTORES THE SOUL.
Long after most children started speaking, Nathaniel continued to stay silent, or his words were so garbled that I could not understand them, though his mother usually could. She played with him, the blocks and the trains. But he was prone to sudden white-faced rages: once, carrying him into Lord & Taylor, I found myself, with Nathaniel in my arms, in front of the escalator, a device that seemed to frighten him, and he began to claw at my eyes. Around that same time, my wife’s back had bite marks and scratch marks, where he had clawed at her. I carried my own wounds around, especially near my eyelids.
But I liked to carry him around anyway, anywhere, on my shoulders, a daddy thing to do. On Saturday night, we danced together to music on NPR and tumbled around on the living room floor, roughhousing. “I am inventing fatherhood,” I told myself. Like most grand concepts, fatherhood appeared to be made up of small, mosaic-like blocks of activities. In Hawaii, it means taking Nathaniel around to see the pop-up lawn sprinklers, which he adores.* Or forcing him to try chicken coated with honey. Or, back in Michigan, singing to him as he falls asleep, particularly “You Are My Sunshine.” Or taking him to McDonald’s, for the hamburgers (not the buns, which he will not eat). Trying to understand his speech, I give him a microphone attached to nothing and pretend to make him into a network correspondent, or a guest on a talk show.† I sit him on my lap so that he can pound the keys on the typewriter, and I sit him on my lap again, downstairs, so that he can pound the keys on the piano. This habit of playing the piano stays with him.
Nathaniel is obsessed with fountains, with elevator doors and escalators, and with gaps that divide and then close, such as screen doors that he can open and shut repetitively, all afternoon. He adores trains.
A young woman wearing a Carleton College T-shirt comes in asking for Daniel. I tell her that he’s not here, that he’s off with Alex working on the chaos machine. She nods, smiles, and disappears. She has a pleasantly absentminded expression freighted with intelligence, very much the norm at this college; I have rarely seen so many intelligent and physically awkward students in one place.* Seeing Carleton students playing Frisbee is like watching a convention of mathematicians out on a dance floor.† The sight is touching but laden with pathos.
I am physically clumsy. Daniel is physically clumsy, or was. Instead of shooting hoops, on almost every Sunday afternoon, winter and summer, he and his mother and I, along with Tasha, the dog, if she is up for it, go out walking in one of the Michigan parks. These walks constitute one of our family rituals—walking on a path in the woods affords both togetherness and privacy: you can be pensive, and in solitude, but you’re being pensive and solitary in the company of your family, and you’re being active, too. Families sometimes give the appearance of three or four solitudes living under the same roof. Ours certainly does. Did.‡
Now I am carrying out Daniel’s chair, purchased by us at ShopKo, and his computer, a giant lumbering old Macintosh. Is it already afternoon? Sweat is pouring down my face and soaking my shirt.
Gertrude Stein, in Everybody’s Autobiography, said that the twentieth century was the era of bad fathers. She noted that bad fathers would appear on the scene locally, within families, and, nationally, as bad political fathers—Hitler and Stalin—and that the appearance of these tyrants was an effort to reintroduce a dead God (He had died in the nineteenth century) and to put Him in charge of the state apparatus. There has already been too much fathering in the twentieth century, Gertrude Stein said. My own parenting lacks a certain authority; I am a somewhat insincere and doubtful father, having never quite become accustomed to the role.
One morning when he was four years old, Nathaniel came downstairs, and when Martha called him “Nathaniel,” he said, “Not Nathaniel. Daniel.” And he became Daniel from then on.* He named himself. My brother Tom was frightened and appalled by our son’s self-naming and worried about what would happen if he tried to do so again. What if he kept renaming himself? Chaos. Napoleon crowned himself—a blasphemy—and Daniel renamed himself, as hippies in my era did. So, OK. Why shouldn’t children name themselves, particularly if they can’t pronounce their given names? So we let him do it, and Martha went down to city hall and had the birth certificate altered so that “Daniel” would appear on it instead of “Nathaniel.”
Despite the normalization of his name, Daniel felt slightly different (to me, to others, maybe to himself) from other boys: obsessive, brilliantly intelligent—those shockingly intricate sentences! that diction level!—and physically at odds with himself. Other kids noticed, and eventually we took him out of public school and placed him in a Waldorf school, a Rudolf Steiner school, where many of the kids were oddballs (even his teacher called them “oddballs,” and the teacher himself was no slouch, either, when it came to oddballdom) and where Daniel was accepted and loved by everybody.*
I dismantle the desk and take it to the van. Or do I?† It’s almost a decade later, now, as I write. The past is beginning to smear together, the years taking their kindly toll.
More rules to live by:
9. WHEN DRIVING, RESPECT THE ORDERLY FLOW OF SPEEDING TRAFFIC.
10. USE THE LEFT LANE TO PASS. BUT DON’T STAY THERE.
11. LIFE IS REALLY VERY SIMPLE; BE OPENHEARTED AND TRY TO LIVE FOR OTHERS. AVOID PRETENSE.
Throughout his childhood and adolescence, we travel; we see the world, we view the United States (by car, by train), the three of us. Daniel and I both love Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts, especially to drive to. An odd love for a father to pass down to a son, but it makes us both laugh.‡ Once, following a case of pneumonia, he says he wants to see New York City, and he and I take a slow train there and back; in the dining car we meet the lead singer for Herman’s Hermits, who tells us about a “great novel,” one of his favorites, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. As Daniel’s father, I explain to my son after we have returned to our compartment why the
famous singer in the dining car is full of shit. This, too, is a parental responsibility.
Daniel begins playing. He plays keyboards. From first grade onward, the house is full of music, morning and night. Mozart, Hummel, Beethoven, and then, later, Virgil Thomson’s Louisiana Story and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G. Have I had anything to do with this? I played records and CDs constantly, but I can’t play the piano, not really; classical music is simply one of the atmospheres Daniel has grown up in and breathed.
On short notice, I write lyrics for his rock band.
You’re from Banana Republic
You look like J. Crew
You’re a victim of fashion
I’m a victim of you.
Adolescence is supposed to be a scary time for parents. In America, at least, the norm is for boys to turn into sweaty sticky hostile monsters, full of rage against the world and their parents. They are full of alcohol and drugs; it is the time in life of projectile vomiting. My wife and I await this change. We wait for yelling and slammed doors. It never happens. Daniel becomes a bit quieter but remains sweet and affable.
He did, however, along with a few of his adolescent chums, have a few other artistic ambitions, which included an intentionally ironic art video entitled Mr. Scary. This feature, made in black and white, combined the moody expressionism of Bergman’s middle period with the outsize silent-film theatrics of Eisenstein. Daniel, playing the eponymous Mr. Scary, accompanied by our dog, Tasha (who played herself),* walked through a forest, raised his eyebrows, answered the door speechlessly (Mr. Scary does not ever speak) when a salesman came to call—all these scenes shot in a pretentious, over-the-top High Art style.† A lighthouse served as a recurrent symbol of something. The tone of the film was jarring: think of Alexander Nevsky in the suburbs. Like Orson Welles’s Quixote, this work of cinematic artistry was never completed. It succumbed to its own irony.